Sun Ra: The Angel Who Announces the End of Time
“We work on the other side of Time.
Consider Time as officially ended.”
One of my favorite games, in my own mind, in my own experience of aesthetics, is to set up two artworks–or an artwork and a belief system, or an artwork and a historical phenomenon–to set them up, as it were, facing one another, and have them talk to each other.
It’s beautiful when two works resonate like the two tines of a tuning fork, and you can stand in the resonance-field in between them.
(Of course, the truest resonance is silence, because a perfect acoustical resonance is an undifferentiated standing wave. But, in actuality, wherever standing waves generate, they find something to bounce off of and create little partials, little distortions, little much more complex patterns. Any resonant sound actually perceived is then an imperfection of true resonance–much as it is rightly said you can’t see pure light until it’s diffracted or bounces off of something. So a little dissonance is anyhow productive…)
For today’s contemplation, what are these two pillars on the horizon? These two vibrating tines that talk so lively to each other and between whom it would be such a delight to stand?
In the red corner:
And, in the blue corner:
“We work outside of time.”
Both of these artists try to call to us from the other side of Time.
* * *
In the red corner is the weird jazz great Sun Ra.
Working in a ramshackle man-camp in the oilfields of far-northern Alaska, where I did cooking and bookkeeping, my coworker Olivia, a professional dog-musher by vocation, a half-Alaska Native former New York real-Bohemian party-scene gal, now a rough-around-the-edges 30-something cleaning rooms in an oilfield camp, believed Sun Ra was the height of cool and profundity. Olivia even called her mushing operation Sun Ra kennels. In the small kitchen on “the pad,” we blasted Sun Ra when none of the crew guys were around, reveling in the weird portal that his bizarre presence on the stereo would open there in the kitchen with us.
Unlike most jazz names, Ra made his band live in a house together and co-participate in esoteric rituals.
He claimed to be a messenger from the planet Saturn. His public raps are full of half-baked but deeply-read knowledge from Egyptian symbology, from the Bible, and from the tarot, all tied together by Ra’s own rhapsodic word play.
His music was everything from Beefheartesque blues to weird free-jazz honking orgies.
He made a movie, Space is the Place. He plays himself, Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist jazz messiah from outer space. He tells the viewer the paradigm of his salvific mission: “The first thing to do is consider time as officially ended.”
* * *
The other side of Time is an imaginal space. We project qualities onto Universe-without-time because we flatter ourselves that we could even see what it would be like. But even our notion of perception includes a necessary element of time. In trying to imagine time after Time, we try to ken what is beyond our ken.
* * *
Olivier Messiaen was not ostentatiously countercultural. In outlook, he was a rather conservative and extremely orthodox Roman Catholic. In societal position, he was a professor at the Paris Conservatoire. Though known as a demanding teacher, I never heard tell of him waking up his students for a 3:30 am practice session as Sun Ra is supposed often to have done to his band members.
He was a French composer, active from the 1920s until the 1990s. His astounding Quartet for the End of Time, for violin, clarinet, cello, and piano, was written in a German prisoner-of-war camp, where he was interned for part of World War II. The Quartet had its premiere in the camp.
* * *
Both these artists endeavor (...do they endeavor, or do they enact?...) to stand themselves on the other side of the gulf which divides us from eternity. And project themselves back at us. They need a form, a mask of eternity. But all forms obscure eternity.
* * *
The Quartet for the End of Time takes its name from a moment, a concrete reality, so Messiaen believed as a devout Catholic, that would come to pass in historical fact, when in the 10th chapter of Revelation, an angel arrives and announces that there shall be time no more.
Each movement of the eight-movement quartet has a suggestive theological title and a surrealist, apocalyptic epigraph penned by Messiaen himself. Both its sound-world and the literary material of the titles and epigraphs embody Messiaen’s vision of the angel, of the end of time, of the transition from history to eternity.
* * *
Certainly, the view from the other side of Time will be weird. I suspect Sun Ra believed he had had experiences on the other side of the Veil of Eternity, or at least at remote and instructive corners of the territory just this side the Veil.
Messiaen probably glimpsed the end of time from that German camp, contemplated the end of his life, and, via different routes, arrived at a view he considered gave him perspective on the End of Time. He never claimed as much--he was not, according to himself, a mystic.
* * *
Seemingly all of us nowadays are constantly projecting ourselves beyond the End of Time as well. For in that imaginal territory we may wake up tomorrow. The End of (human perception of) Time may be upon us each hour of the day. The nukes may go off tomorrow. Who knows?
What will it be like, that wink into eternity? Will we go clutching this earthly existence or pass with eyes open into the strange beyond? Will this whole circus of human experience simply wink out and leave behind a dead rock in some very fucking unimportant sector of the Universe with no one to mourn us?
Will our spirits wander restlessly like the signals from our communications technology which sojourn into the abyss forever (growing weaker as they spread outward, in accordance with the inverse-square law)?
What will it be like, in that promised land where all our spirits are free of these heavy, cumbersome, decaying, timebound bodies? Imagine the mind like fire unbound, at large in the Universe, not seeking another home to crawl into, a home ensconced in a material body, another incarnation; but instead floating peacefully through this cosmos, invested in no particular thing or place, taking on no identity, and having no inside and no outside.
Or will the Kingdom be a conventional bourgeois heaven?--that most socially-conditioned, unimaginative, and fear-bound of imaginal afterlives, but who the fuck knows, maybe the orthodox were onto something. Where it’s a great gettin-up morning, it’s a big camp meeting in the sky, where the praise band never stops playing and the angels are just trumpeting the glory of a patriarchal king which for some reason is meant to sound like a mystical, liberated, just eternity. It’s grandma’s house, all your favorite people are there, Fido never grew old and infirm, and you can have all the delicious, melty-pure pie and ice cream you want forever and ever amen.
(But here I am, equating apocalypse with eternity. According to Messiaen’s interpretation of Revelation, eternity will be a feature of Armageddon. [There’s that bad terminology again–Armageddon being actually a different feature of the apocalypse, quite distinct from the End of Time. My eschatology was never my strong suit]. The End of Time will be one of the steps of the eschaton. I suppose my premise is that annihilation will be, for the subjective consciousness [or for the collective consciousness if the species be annihilated all at once], itself the instantiation of eternity. This is the old mystical afterlife: not merely interminable life at the right hand of JHWH, but the transcendence of Time altogether. Maybe time is an artefact of animal cognition and, when the last brain stops experiencing it, eternity in its crystalline unity will reign. Maybe the angel will come, and Change itself will cease.)
The brilliant ethnobotanist and psychedelic proselyte Terence McKenna believed he had calculated a “Time-Wave” in history, and he believed he could show that Time itself was speeding up–as the increasingly-networked and historically-madcap productions of humankind exponentially accelerated the actual rate of novelty in the Universe as a whole. He believed that the Time-Wave would oscillate ever more frequently until all distinction between newness and oldness, between what had existed and what would exist, would be lost in the shrieking of this foaming torrent of novelty. He called this point the “transcendental object at the end of time.” One might say that McKenna’s calculations placed that point too early, since he calculated the object’s arrival in 2012…then again, if the “transcendental object” is analogous to the Angel from Revelation 10, and if the prophecy of the Angel was fulfilled in 1972 (Sun Ra being that angel and Space is the Place being his annunciation), perhaps McKenna pinned it too late rather than too early…[1]
* * *
If it really is on the other side of Time, if it is any kind of Eternity, the one thing that we can say about it for sure is that we can’t imagine it in the slightest. Time is part of every single experience we have. Even the physical brain events which record and decode the sensory data of experience must be transacted in Time.
If there is any such experience as brain-unmediated consciousness (one would guess, a prerequisite for consciousness of Eternity), the one thing we can say about it, is that it would differ immeasurably from the brain-mediated consciousness we have experienced in every biographical moment of our existence so far.
* * *
Sun Ra enacts his own arrival, in a spaceship, from another dimension. (This is one of the opening images of Space is the Place). He comes to speak to us from the realm the highest alchemical and meditative magicians visit; he psychically transposes himself there before translating himself back to us in the music and message of Sun Ra, and the film Space is the Place.
Alvin the Alchemical Mongoose (the name, perhaps, for a minor folk wizard of a certain hunter-gatherer tribe who lived 900 years ago) could never in his wildest wet dreams have pulled off a symbol-working like what Sun Ra can achieve using 1970s technicolor and amplified sound–itself pretty weak magic next to all the CGI geegaws and virtual realities of 2021.
Ra overtly claims to work on the other side of time. The first thing to do, is consider time as officially ended. Does such a claim make the slightest sense? Is the claim itself a magical energy-emanation which will manifest itself somehow, in this world? Can Sun Ra authoritatively announce that there is “time no more”?
One gets intimations during the movie, of the feeling of being on the other side of Time. Sun Ra instantiates it with his weird music; with his strange space-hieroglyphic symbol vocabulary; with the unbelievable claims that issue from the character’s mouth throughout the film.
* * *
Messiaen lets the angel do his announcing for him:
Revelation 10:1 “And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire:
…
5 And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven,
6 And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer:
7 But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets.”
We call the source of these verses the King James Bible, although Sun Ra had his own idiosyncratic title for the same text, namely, The Source-Book of Man’s Life and Death.
. . .
What was the sound of this strange one’s voice in the ears of that John, lonely on Patmos so far from the hills of Jerusalem?
Did it sound so otherworldly, floating impossible in tangles of its own reverberations, like the best special effect that a Hollywood sound designer can give to a voice of unearthly power? We secretly know that all the tricks of the audio engineer’s trade are inadequate to this task––or we hope they are. (When They can capture the inflections of angels, no heaven will be left to die into).
Was the angel’s voice like a vocalise sung among its own broken shards? This is the sound of the Vocalise pour l’ange qui annonce la fin du temps–the second movement of Messiaen’s quartet. Why does Messiaen call it a Vocalise (a term for a wordless song or vocal exercise)? Is the angel just warming up, clearing his throat with the tubular-bell shimmers of the piano’s “blue orange chords”? In aeon-beyond-time, warm-up and performance are all the same. The vocalise, and the public performance for which it is the preparation, happen both before and after each other. Is it future, or is it past?
* * *
What is symbol-play and what is affect?
Sun Ra says, in a Berkeley lecture on “African Man in the Cosmos”: “Sometimes it’s difficult to talk to you, cause if I tell you something, you don’t know the different symbols and things; you might not catch it.”
Do you hear, do you “catch,” the symmetry of Messiaen’s shapes, in space and time? In the vertical vibratory spectral space between tones he builds palindromic mobiles. Little eternities like benzene rings, triply or quadruply rotationally symmetric (thanks to that divisible twelveness of that beautiful-ugly equal temperament of ours)? Messiaen calls this “the charm of impossibilities”: no new view is afforded by looking backward at the music from its ending: no new chord is arrived at by inverting the intervals. The normal style of tonality in music is asymmetric: the asymmetries of the major scale allow it to “lead” somewhere, to have stable and unstable areas, to have centers of gravity. Sounds are organized as tensions and releases–like the potential energy released when a spring is let go and returns to its stable state. You can calculate the state of the expanding spring as a function of time elapsed since it was let go. But if you could construct a dynamically motionless spring, one in which tension and release always canceled each other out, one which did not have a qualitative difference between its resting state and its tensed state, such an object would negate the dimension of time entirely, since all points on the time continuum would be functionally identical. This eternity-spring is like Messiaen’s non-retrogradable rhythm; the eternity spring is like Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition. [2]
Sun Ra advises in his Berkeley lecture: “You really got to get yourself together, and realize these phonetics.” [3]
* * *
In his public speech, and in his outward appearance, and certainly in his film Space is the Place, Sun Ra loves to express himself in symbolically-laden images. The meaning-soaked signifiers of Egyptian mythology, of the figures from the tarot, of Western esotericism, are given over and over by Sun Ra as though they have semantic meanings which can be grasped if understood.
He worries, as quoted above: “if I tell you something, you don’t know the different symbols and things; you might not catch it.”
His music is no such way. His music is pure energy-magic. No knowledge of the symbols is needed. The music carries its weird energy straight from his subjectivity, from his Arkestra’s collective subjectivity, to your subjectivity.
In the film, Ra considers music a vehicle of space transportation. Like a teleportation device, Ra’s music can transport the dispossessed black people of 1970s Oakland to the paradise planet where they will be free of repressive structures and white hegemony.
Does Messiaen do something similar in his description of the first movement of his quartet? After describing the musical scene he is setting, Messiaen instructs: “Transpose this onto a religious plane and you have the harmonious silence of Heaven.” Messiaen’s music, too, is like a spaceship off this world, the riding of which ends the listener up beyond the music and on an otherworldly plane. Sun Ra, again (from his song “I am an Instrument”): “I am an instrument. The timbre of my voice flies with the winds of heaven.”
Sun Ra believed that his words and music could change others. He believed, moreover, that each of us could be changed through our own modes of expression: “According to the language that you speak,” he said in his Berkeley lectures, “you will become like that.” If Sun Ra was an incarnation of that angel from Revelation 10, maybe his admonitions on how we should speak are like the scroll that the Angel feeds to the prophet:
9 And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.
10 And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.
11 And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.
* * *
In moments, strange moments, Ra’s and Messiaen’s music can even sound alike. Take the opening texture of Ra’s song “Quest”--an irregularly-repeated single note in the pianist’s right hand over changing chords in the left. Doesn’t this remind us of certain textures in the Quatuor, where perhaps the violin or clarinet imitates birdsong with some number of rhythmically-jarring repetitions of a single note, over the floating, mobile-motionless color-harmonies changing in the piano? The irregularity tells us, “there shall be Time [in Indian music, laya means both time-as-duration as well as pulse] no more…”.
"Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes" (“Dance of fury for the seven trumpets”) is the sixth movement of the Quatuor. Its jazzy driving character and the occasional diversions into a sort of obsessive repetition make it weirdly resemble the music of Sun Ra, too. Were there ever seven trumpets in Sun Ra’s band, as there are in Revelation?
Messiaen was a synesthesiac: to him, there were correlations between certain sounds and certain shapes and colors. To him they were quite literal and clear as day. Many visual images, he believed, could be painted in tone–as if each visual-spatial form also had a corresponding frequency. Maybe he would’ve accorded with Sun Ra’s claim in the Berkeley lectures: “Everybody, everything, is throwing out music. This is throwing it out, this is throwing it out.” All this clamor of vibrations being thrown off every person and object: what can it be like when Time is no more? One must go again to Messiaen’s words: “the harmonious silence of heaven.”
***
Consider the rainbow which the Bible says is “upon the head” of the Angel. Messiaen makes the rainbow into a whole “tangle of rainbows.” His note on the seventh movement reads:
The angel appears in full force, especially the rainbow that covers him (the rainbow, symbol of peace, wisdom, and all luminescent and sonorous vibration). – In my dreams, I hear and see ordered chords and melodies, known colors and shapes; then, after this transitional stage, I pass through the unreal and suffer, with ecstasy, a tournament; a roundabout co-penetration of superhuman sounds and colors. These swords of fire, this blue-orange lava, these sudden stars: there is the tangle, there are the rainbows!
By this point are we at all surprised by the resonance with certain words of Sun Ra? How about the opening line from his song “I Am Strange”:
“I am strange. My mind is tinted with the colors of madness. They fight in silent fury in the effort to possess each other.”
***
Audio excerpts from Space is the Place are utilized on the great album MadVillainy by MF DOOM and MadLib. This Angel’s voice, the proclamation, “The first thing to do is to consider time as officially ended” still resonates with these two African-American artists thirty years after Ra first spoke them–they are like the prophets who eat the angel’s scroll and then go on to convey the message to the world.
JF Martel and Phil Ford, in one of the Patreon audio extras for their superb podcast Weird Studies, point out that, in his rhythmic style on the album, DOOM is fighting his own fight against Time, thereby gesturing toward the eternal. Martel and Ford call DOOM’s loose and slippery rhythmic style a “war on Time,” and say that DOOM “refuses to be captured by Time.” Even though the Ra sample is right there in the audio to be grabbed onto, Martel and Ford don’t point out that Ra explicitly says, “we work on the other side of time”--perhaps leaving that low-hanging fruit for someone like me to point out. [4]
***
All in all, the eternal is ungraspable but it sends its weird tendrils into our timebound dimension. Timelessness sent strange tendrils into the minds of John of Patmos, Olivier Messiaen, Sun Ra, and MF DOOM & MadLib. It’s a concept alluring, magnetic, and ultimately ineffable. Among its weird products you may count this essay.
The thoughts that led up to this essay have constituted my own experience of a “roundabout co-penetration,” not of “superhuman sounds and colors,” but of the sounds and the visual imagery of two humans as they reach toward the superhuman. These two so-different musicians’ conceptions and depictions of eternity have had to co-penetrate, and even to puncture, my own thoughts about that most abstract of concepts. I’m left to ponder, how does one “work on the other side of Time”? If McKenna is right, and the proliferation of human cultural and network novelty is driving us toward a singularity event, then both authors’ cultural output envisioning eternity, and even this, my essay about it, are driving us toward that eternity ever faster. Here we come!
***
[1] Those who want to read more about McKenna’s timewave are directed to Erik Davis’ High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, or to McKenna’s own The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching.
[2] This paragraph deals in some music theory concepts. If you want to go beyond my images here, see Messiaen’s own Technique de mon langage musical. The modes of limited transposition are pitch-sets, like scales, which Messiaen deploys but which differ from standard Western harmony by being rotationally-symmetrical in tone space. The non-retrogradable rhythms are rhythmic palindromes which have the same sequence of note values whether read backwards and forwards. Messiaen makes use of both devices in the Quatuor.
[3] All the Berekeley lecture material is taken from https://www.openculture.com/2014/07/full-lecture-and-reading-list-from-sun-ras-1971-uc-berkeley-course.html
[4] Weird Studies is a great “arts and philosophy podcast” available on most podcast streaming platforms. The discussion on MadVillainy is an extra accessible only by Patreon subscribers, posted to Patreon July 27, 2022.